Saying Goodbye to My “Fargo” Accent by Robert Jensen
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 12, 2006

Ever
since the movie Fargo came out a decade ago, my ability to mimic
the Scandinavian-inflected accent of my hometown and home state of North
Dakota has been a guaranteed way to elicit laughter during my public
speaking.

That joking ended earlier this month, when I
realized -- in a painfully public manner -- that my use of that North
Dakota accent was in a small but undeniable way supportive of a
white-supremacist account of the history of this country. The story of
that episode illustrates not just the depth of the pathology of white
America but also a way we white folks can -- with self-reflection and help
from others -- start to transform ourselves.

For those who have never seen the 1996 movie
or heard a white person from the Dakotas or Minnesota (despite the title
“Fargo,” which is the largest city in North Dakota, the film is set in
Minnesota), the accent has an amusing sing-songy quality and trademark
phrases such as, “Ah, geez” and “Yah, you betcha!” In print it may not
sound particularly funny, but with the right delivery it can be a crowd
pleaser.

That is, it’s a crowd pleaser in certain
crowds -- such as an audience at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign where I was speaking, and where few are likely to think
much about real Dakota history.

I was at the university to participate in a
panel on racism and white privilege, a subject about which I’ve written a
book, making me an alleged expert. In my introductory remarks I made
reference to my upbringing in North Dakota and the accent made famous by
the movie, using it for a bit of comic relief in a discussion of a
difficult subject.

On that panel with me was D. Anthony Tyeeme
Clark, a professor of American Indian Studies at that university and a
citizen of the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa. Although I
didn’t poll the audience, I’m pretty sure Clark was one of the few
indigenous people there. (Clark told me later that of the 100-plus
students and faculty who have self-identified as American Indian on campus
in recent years, about 15 to 20 are citizens of Indian nations or tribal
members, and even fewer are tribally connected.)

In the course of his talk, Clark made
reference to the fact that in the United States, English is a foreign
language. That remark set off in my head a chain of thoughts that left me
resolved to never again joke about a North Dakota accent.

Let’s start with the obvious: While some of
the indigenous people killed or displaced by Europeans and their
descendants learned to communicate in English with the settler-colonizers,
they did so in a second (or third, fourth, or fifth) language. English is
not a native language in the territory we now call the United States --
it’s the language of a colonizing people who pursued a genocidal strategy
to acquire that territory and its resources. Though I’ve spent some time
reading about that history, it had never occurred to me think of English
in that way; being part of the dominant group in a society allowed me to
avoid those kinds of obvious, and harsh, realities.

As I sat at the table next to Clark, I
realized what his remark meant: I don’t really speak with a North Dakota
accent, and to label my speech as such is to obscure that history of
European colonization and barbarism toward indigenous people. What would a
real Dakota accent, North or South, sound like? Nothing like the
characters from “Fargo,” that’s for sure. That white Dakota accent is
mostly Scandinavian, transplanted through colonization.

As all this ran through my head, I realized
I should scrap my planned closing remarks and use my last few minutes to
face this issue. I told the group that I was embarrassed that for so long
I had not recognized these obvious points. I was emotional and probably
not being all that clear; I looked out at the audience and saw that I
wasn’t explaining it well. So I went to the blackboard and wrote “North
Dakota,” and then erased “North.” What’s left? “Dakota.” Who are the
people today who really speak with a “Dakota” accent? Their ancestors
aren’t from Scandinavia or any other part of Europe.

Those people were -- and still are -- the
Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota, usually collectively referred to as the Great
Sioux Nation. Their languages are part of a family that linguistic
anthropologists call Siouan or Siouan-Catawban, which is still spoken on
the Great Plains of the United States and parts of southern Canada.

I don’t speak any of those languages. I
can’t reproduce the accent with which those peoples speak. In other words,
I can’t do a real Dakota accent. I can only do the settler-colonizers’
accent.

In my home state, we took not only the land
of the people of those nations but their name as well, and we then pretend
that we are Dakotans. It’s perhaps a small point, but an important one: I
am not of the Dakota people. I am of the people who tried to exterminate
the Dakota and who colonized their land.

And what of those original colonizers and
their descendants? I can hear my people in North Dakota saying something
like this: “Hey, most of those so-called colonizers were relatively poor
farmers from Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe who came to
the United States to scratch out a living and who built a prosperous life
through a lot of hard work.”

Fair enough; those folks did work hard under
arduous conditions. In my family, the last immigrant from Scandinavia was
my paternal grandfather, who came from Denmark as a teenager and worked
hard his whole life as a blacksmith, mostly in North Dakota and Minnesota.

But no matter what the stories of our
families, two things are unavoidable. First is that the land on which
those immigrants worked so hard was available only because of a genocidal
campaign that eliminated most of the indigenous population. Second is that
the majority of those immigrants and their descendants never challenged
that injustice. Like most European immigrants who came here without much
privilege, they accepted what was to be a privileged place in a
white-dominant society by embracing white supremacy.

It’s easy for me to sit back, writing this
essay, to make all these obvious points about the white supremacy that
exists out there, in the world. But the fact remains: For years I have
used the “Fargo” joke without any thought to those very same points. This
is a story not only of the crimes of the past and present, but of how I --
like so many white people -- can both know these things and ignore them at
the same time.

So, what triggered all this as I sat on the
panel at the University of Illinois? The simple answer is, Tony Clark.

Because the logo of the main university in
my home state, the University of North Dakota, is the racist “Fighting
Sioux” caricature, I have been
studying the issue of American Indian mascots and nicknames for some
time. Much of what Clark said was familiar to me. Yet there was something
about his clarity, honesty, and passion that got to me. His presentation
forced me to remember that what is for me a political issue is for him and
other American Indians today also a lived reality. Clark, his Indian
colleagues, and other citizens of a variety of Indian nations -- students,
staff, and faculty -- walk every day on that campus and look at t-shirts
and posters with a caricature that remind them that the dominant white
culture doesn’t really much care about them

The discussion that day made me
uncomfortable, and for that I am grateful to Clark. Like anyone in a
position of dominance, it’s easy for me to grow comfortable with
injustice, even when engaged in political activity to resist it. Listening
to Clark that day I learned some things, but just as important is that I
had to confront an emotional reality; it was the combination of that
knowing and feeling that led me to recognize what was wrong with the jokes
I’ve been telling about my home state’s accent.

In the context of all that must happen for
the United States to become a truly just multiracial society, this
struggle of mine over a marginally funny joke might seem fairly
inconsequential, just a small step in one person’s struggle. But the
bigger lesson is that I wouldn’t have taken the step (1) if there had been
no forum in which I could hear Clark speak, (2) if Clark had not been
willing to be generous in offering to the group his knowledge in such
honest fashion, or (3) if I had run away from my feeling of discomfort.

For people with privilege in an unjust world
-- whether it’s men in relation to women, the setter-colonizer in relation
to indigenous peoples, white people in relation to people of color, the
rich in relation to working and poor people, or U.S. citizens in relation
to the country’s domination of the rest of the world -- it’s imperative
that we invite into our worlds those on the other side of that privilege,
not to make us feel good but precisely to challenge us to have the courage
to feel uncomfortable.

If we can’t do that, there is little hope
for the world -- and no hope for our own souls.

* * * *

I am grateful to Professor Clark for his
comments and suggestions, which are reflected in this final version of the
essay. For more information on his work, see
www.nah.uiuc.edu/faculty-Clark.htm.

Robert Jensen
is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and
board member of the
Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of
The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and
Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity
(both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.